For the last few days I’ve been toiling away in the dissertation mines and buzzing with visions of sugar plum ROFLfairies. Those two things are not mutually-exclusive. I have however kept relatively quiet on the latter, as these few final steps are crunching my brainbones & essentially amount to a dissertation reenactment of The Human Centipede. Perhaps it’s a testament to what happens when your brain is on trolls for four years (the new bathsalts?), but after my advisor told me I needed to create more links between chapters, my first thought was OH! YOU MEAN LIKE ASS TO MOUTH! I CAN DO THAT. I wish I were kidding. No I don’t.

More actual writing soon, I have much to say — Andy Baio wrote a cool thing over at Wired and want to add my seventy cents. But. THE CENTIPEDE calls, for now.

Good god, this weekend. I’m in the airport waiting to fly back to normalish, grasping for something to say about the last 48 hours. I suspect I’ll need a few days to digest. And by “digest,” I mean “revise my conclusion.” Well not really revise, more like augment. Lots of new evidence, both explicit (i.e. stuff people were actually arguing on panels and in the clogged hallways) and implicit (i.e. stuff people weren’t outright addressing but were enacting). Everything in my bag with a blank surface is now covered in notes, and I have a seventy-five page long rambling notes-to-self prose poem email containing gems like the following, taken from moot’s solo panel:

{leaving)we’re losing ……. the stories. being stripped of that richness.”
memes the instruments by which we would play music
fear we’re losing our song
so keep playing your music………
am i just an old young guy

the kids are finding new creepy things

“this is like a support group”

as an old guy, i’ve heard it all before

niche mainstream, old eople get mad, finds a way to break out and become niche again. we’re in that process, in the middle of that cycle.

Memes in China! Brazil! Syria! I can’t even type through these because I’m learning. An Xiao Mia. Political memes. “Street art of the social web.” Participatory culture leading very slowly to …. aw fuck this is too awesome. Grass Mud Horse. I can’t even. Bia Granja! Brazil! YouPIX, 6,000+ people. Shows a video of moot dancing. Yes, with the laughter. Explanation of media setup, relationship to meme generation. Social media was the key. Nipples boy. New Rule 34, it’s the video is viral there is funk of it. Motherfucker fucker, I’m awesome. Sou foda. Ah, THAT’S what he was dancing to. The importance of fun. Anas Qtiesh, Syria. Weird role of humor in political activism. Memes help break fear in governments. No revolution is complete without rage comics.

MORE AFTER THE BREAK

From Micro-Fame to Nano-Fame

UNITING HUMANITY UNDER THE RAINBOW, because we’re all different colors.

The guy who made Me Gusta is talking about a sort of dissociative relationship with his drawring. And says it belongs to the internet, not him, so is like, meh I wasn’t going to commoditize that shit. Isn’t mine anymore.

I’ll be updating with UPDATES probably spread over a few posts per day. i.e. short posts will become longer posts, as things worth mentioning are mentioned.

Zittrain Keynote: ROFLpeople? This tribe. This phenomenon. What is it? Am I one? Maybe sort of. But when I was a kid, COMPUTERS. Other embarrassing things. Nerds and their connection to memes. That lone wolf, the out group, MEMES. They’re bad, and we’re good. Here’s to us being good. This zone as a space of retreat, separation. But with the shit we do, there’s real life. Relating to these things. Establishing connection to the world via memeshit. Thanks, Know Your Meme! FFFFFFUUUUUUU- shirts, Hot Topic. People don’t like it when you try too hard. Unstaged is what makes a meme. A wonderful moment. Authenticity, a real person implicated in the meme. Inadvertant success. Winning the internet lottery! This is good? Y/N. William Tecumseh Sherman! Respecting robots.txt. I prefer it not be accessible through search engines. Case studies: Star Wars Kid, Privileged Denying Dude. Bizarre laws of physics — when you volunteer yourself up, especially for profit or #winning, you fail. Tide goes in, tide goes out. You can’t explain that. Thanks to burgeoning political awareness, ok to make memes based on THE WORLD. You can explain that. There are other avenues for expression that have been made fluid by the phenomenon of the internet meme. “Can’t send attachments in outlook, bans the internet.” Wow this backdrop. Is that talking about HPV? Dead cells make no tumors. Cancerous mutations. But seriously, let’s talk about Anon’s support of Wikileaks. Are people doing this because they’re serious? Or clearly ironic. YES. LOIC. Charging lasers. Ghost Busters, serious but flipping people off as they did what they did. HBGary, Anon strikes back. DID YOU THINK THE BEES WOULD NOT DEFEND IT? I don’t even understand, but it’s funny. Memes extending out to realm of action. Performance art? Or real conflict. FUN TILL IT GOT SERIOUS. Downfall videos about Hitler, about memes? Um. Memes can be a powerful force, brings serious down to earth. As soon as it involves politics, an ethical dilemma, there’s an element of permanence…….harder to just have fun. I don’t know? The Menudo question, aging out. What will happen with the new class? Putting away childish things. Hmm. Irony? Counterculture, against the unfunny cynicism of our mainstream institutions. Reactionary. I love how Patrick Stewart is like, “What the Fuck?”

I’m sitting in a lecture hall at MIT waiting for Jonathan Zittrain’s keynote. The room is packed, I can hear echoes of that goddamn Rickroll kid out in the hallway (dude that wasn’t funny in 2010), and am trying to make sense of the ROFLteam’s goodbye announcement. This will probably be the most important thing that happens all weekend. More to come.

You might have to watch on YouTube, due to disabled embedding request (why do people do that?). I can’t mad though, because of dogs.

I’m headed off to ROFLcon later this evening — will be speaking on Saturday’s Adventures in Aca-meme-ia (GET IT???) panel. I’m excited about seeing everybody, and know the conference itself will be kickass (Tim and the rest of the ROFLcompany are geniuses at planning these things) but come to the table with some ambivalence. As a friend and I were discussing yesterday, the internet (little i, not big I) is in this weird moment of transition, and I’m not sure exactly how those changes will manifest themselves at this, the mother of all internet culture conferences. On a more practical level, I’m not sure how this, the mother of all internet culture conferences, will fit into the conclusion of my dissertation (which I’ve already written, but undoubtedly will need to revise, like all the goddamn chapters I thought I finished). ROFLcon figures pretty prominently in that last chapter, and throughout the whole manuscript actually; I’ve talked at length about ROFLcon I in 2008, ROFLcon II in 2010 and 2011‘s ROFLcon summit — ROFLcon III will complete the set, which means I’ll probably be making revisions as I’m sitting in the various panels. Don’t know how that will go, but I do know that whatever it is, it will be a thing.